Procedure for semi sweet cider question...

[jasonrn2000]

Hi all. Thank you all for this wonderful forum. I have learned a lot. I am making my first cider and it seems there are several ways to end up with sweet cider.

My goal is a semi-sweet carbonated cider. I don't have equipment for cold crashing or kegging. I plan on bottle pasteurizing using the stove top method in the sticky. I also want to use juice to sweeten, preferable the fresh pressed cider I am using as my base that was purchased from a local mill.

I am wondering what the difference is between the following two methods? Is it simply a preference, or is one better?
Here is where I am confused:

1. Ferment dry, back sweeten

vs

2. Ferment Semi-dry

Either method, I will use the plastic bottle to monitor carbonation prior to pasteurizing.

Thank you
Jason

 

[Drewed]

Ferment dry/ backsweeten will allow time for your cider to clear more. However, the fact that you are going to sweeten with more fresh press cider means that your cider will clear once it is in the bottle and you will have a fair amount of stuff on the bottom of the bottles, so clearing will not be as important.

Which ever method you use, be sure to monitor the bottle pressure so you don't have bombs.

 

[bernardsmith]

From my perspective "fermenting semi-dry" is a bit like trying to stop your car traveling at 90 MPH by throwing out an anchor. It might catch something and it might stop the car but most drivers prefer brakes. Are you going to be monitoring the SG every few hours? Let's say you are and you just measured the gravity to be at the point you want to stop fermentation. How are you going to stop it? Are you going to chill the cider down to close to freezing? How long will that take? What is happening to the yeast as the temperature drops? They will continue to ferment, so the actual final gravity will be drier than you want. OK, so let's say you stabilize the cider rather than chill it. How long does it take the K-meta and K-sorbate to prevent any further fermentation? K-sorbate simply stops yeast from reproducing so the effect will be to allow the current living generation to ferment on until they die without any further budding (reproduction) ... AND if your plan is now to have carbonated cider the only CO2 that will be in the bottle will be the CO2 that has already been produced and not yet expelled.
The far more practical method is to determine the amount of sugar in the cider (or mead or wine) and allow the yeast to eat their way through every last molecule. You then stabilize and backsweeten or else you add a sugar that the yeast simply cannot ferment under any circumstance but which tastes perceptibly sweet.

 

[jasonrn2000]

Thank you both!

I will go with the more practical method and backsweeten. Any suggestions to sweeten by retaining the fresh apple flavor and reducing the funk at the bottom of the bottle? That is why my original thought was to use the fresh cider. Maybe concentrate it somehow?

 

[bernardsmith]

Why not take a gallon of apple juice and freeze it, then collect the first runnings as the frozen juice is allowed to thaw. Monitor the gravity of what you are collecting. My guess is that if I assume the apple juice would have a gravity of about 1.045 - 1.050 - and so a gallon of the juice would be equivalent to adding a heavy pound of sugar (or 40 points) (and sweet cider might have a final gravity of about 10 or 15 points (so 1/4 or 1/3 of a pound of sugar per gallon of cider), you will probably find that the first one third you collect will have a gravity reading of about 1.080 -1.090 (you will have concentrated the sugars because much of the water will still be frozen while the sugars and flavor molecules are all liquefy sooner. So to increase the SG by 10 points you would need to add far less liquid (and so you would be reducing the ABV far less)...

 

[Maylar]

There will be far less sediment in the bottles if you allow the ferment to finish and clear before bottling and sweetening. When you pasteurize an incomplete fermentation there's a whole bunch of yeast that will fall out. It only takes 2-3 gravity points to bottle condition, so it's fairly simple to figure out how much sugar to add at bottling time.